Slavery by Another Name (57 page)

supplies as a proxy for the sale of humans themselves. Able black

men and their families routinely "sold" for $250 in this Lowndes

County. Black families who resisted their sale to other whites were

subject to brutal violence and the con scation or burning of their

homes and possessions. Once under a labor contract to any white

man, blacks knew they would almost certainly never be free of it.

Disputes over the value of the cot on they raised were set led by

local o cials control ed by the white farmers. Any man who fought

back against overseers beating workers in the eld risked gruesome

punishments and sale into the convict leasing system.

Robbed of her crop, DuBois's central character, Zora, knows she

has no recourse: "What should she do? She never thought of appeal

to courts, for Colonel Cresswel was Justice of the Peace and his son

was baili . Why had they stolen from her? She knew. She was now

penniless, and in a sense helpless. She was now a peon bound to a

master's bidding." She knew that signing a contract to work for the

Cresswel s "would mean slavery, jail, or hounded running away."

While hunger and the physical abuse of overseers haunted every

day, it was jail, the chain gang, or any other contact with the

judicial system that loomed as the greatest constant jeopardies to

blacks. Starved and manacled squads of black men prowled the

town square and the roads between plantations, hustled along by

gun- and whip-toting guards—a scene hardly changed from the

traveling slave salesmen of a half century earlier. At the slightest

provocation, Cresswel threatened this ignominious horror to any

uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a

uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a

white man would, almost without exception, be court-sanctioned

ownership. Once hauled before a judge, any African American

could be purchased by Colonel Cresswel or another white. One

passage of DuBois's novel described the routine courthouse scene:

"What's this nigger charged with?" demanded the Judge when the rst

black boy was brought up before him.

"Breaking his labor contract."

"Any witnesses?"

"I have the contract here," announced the sheriff. "He refuses to work."

"A year, or one hundred dollars."

Colonel Cresswell paid his fine, and took him in charge.12

In October 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Judge

Speer's order against Georgia's county convict leasing system,13

nding that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to dismantle the

system of obtaining and sel ing prisoners so vividly described by

DuBois. In January 1906, Warren Reese gave up the modest o ce

in the Montgomery federal building from which he had waged his

quixotic war on slavery. The White House named a new district

at orney for central Alabama.

Three months later, in April 1906, John W. Pace was pardoned

for his crimes by President Roosevelt.14 The fol owing year, Fletcher

Turner was elected to represent Tal apoosa County in the Alabama

House of Representatives.

XI

NEW SOUTH RISING

"This great corporation."

For three years, Americans had received periodic reports on the

slavery of Tal apoosa County. The county, with its exotic

Choctaw Indian name meaning "pulverized rock," and the image

of John Pace, a brutish farmer from the backcountry became the

only enduring symbol of the peonage cases—even as hundreds and

then thousands of other incidents emerged in parts of Alabama,

Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Darkness was crowding

black life in America in an ever more sinister way.

Lost in the Alabama peonage inquiry was how the case began—

with the report to Judge Jones of a miscarriage of justice in the

adjacent Shelby County. Whatever misdeeds had occurred there—

especial y the fact that Fletcher Turner's family operated a slave-

driven quarry within the county— had been almost entirely

forgot en. The town of Columbiana—a provincial county seat

urgently hoping to embody the incipient gleam of the new century

—escaped excoriation. One town nearer to Birmingham than

Dadevil e, bustling with prosperity, new residents, and a vague

sense of Rooseveltian modernity, Columbiana was swel ing with

new wealth. Old one-man, one-mule mines of the nineteenth

century—lit le more than crude horizontal pits dug into hil sides

outside the town—were fast disappearing, replaced by giant brick

edi ces of factories like the Siluria Cot on Mil , where white men

and women could earn wages in regular hourly increments. They

worked de ned shifts, rather than the meteorological clock of

sunup to sundown that had governed farm life since the days of the

rst set lers. Keystone Lime Co. supplied trainloads of the caustic

essential ingredient for iron to the county's biggest employer, the

antebel um Shelby Iron Works, and to the ravenous new furnaces

coming into blast on the fringes of Birmingham.

The bounding economic progress promised far more for whites

than blacks, but African Americans could not resist the entrancing

al ure of new prosperity. Shelby County was now home to growing

numbers of the black members of the Cot ingham clan. Brier eld,

the old Confederate munitions foundry where Green Cot enham and

his family had sheltered during the 1890s, couldn't survive against

the new mil ennium's technology of coal, iron, and steel

production. The foundry town had been a refuge for the family in

the storm of the late nineteenth century. Sheltered by the foundry's

need for a steady supply of black workers, some of the Cot en-hams

avoided for a time the resubjugation of African Americans occurring

on mil ions of southern farms. A succession of black men linked

back to the Cot ingham farm—Scip, the patriarchal slave who now

spel ed his name Cot inham, his sons, Elbert and Henry, his

grandsons, and others—worked in the wilting orbits of re

surrounding the furnaces. Mary and the other wives and older

daughters kept house and washed or cooked for laborers. The

foundry work was grueling, but for a lit le longer Brier eld

a orded these African Americans a way station of modest freedom

and a residue of authentic independence that was fast disappearing

for most rural blacks. Relatively remote from any large population

of whites, the six hundred African Americans there could avoid the

implicit risk of mingling with whites on the roadways into the

county seat or accidental con icts on the back roads of the

countryside. The whites of the furnace town needed them. Rev.

Starr's old Methodist church stil stood—giving Brier eld's black

families their own forum for leadership and worship. In a crude,

overcrowded school for black children, Green and his two older

sisters learned to read and write.

What irony that the maker of cannons for Lee's armies and armor

for the Confederacy's warships became a place of refuge for freed

slaves. But Brier eld, with its redolent sense of post-emancipation

freedom, was vanishing. By 1910 only twenty-nine people

remained. Mary Green, and the girls, Ada and Mariet a, fol owed

the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

a lit le town perched on a new coal mine in Shelby County just

south of Birmingham. Soon, Mary was working— washing and

cleaning for a white man. Columbiana was a short freight car ride

away. Whatever remained to harbor Green and his siblings would

quickly dissolve before the torrent of trouble pouring across their

world.

Late in the summer of the great 1903 peonage trials in

Montgomery, Green turned eighteen years old.1 Ada was twenty-

one and Mariet a nineteen. Green and his sisters and cousins had

experienced none of the emancipation exhilaration that their

parents and grandparents remembered from the end of the war.

Theirs had been a life of perplexing contradiction, of an ostensible

but most often unrealized freedom, of supposed political and

economic independence from whites but in truth, even in Brierfield,

ultimately a complete dependence on the authority and protection

of whites—or simply the security of isolation. The sisters would stay

with their mother at least until marriage. But Green was nearly a

man now, tal , lean, and muscular like his father, sharpened by the

paucity of food, hardened by the incessant labor demanded of his

life. The freedom of approaching male adulthood—even in the

circumscribed South—was an inescapable al ure.

Green soon ventured deep into the sphere of white men, though

they must have remained a mystery to him. He had to know al the

stories of his father and aunts and uncles who had lived with the

white Cot inghams on the farm by the river. But those were ancient

tales from before his birth. In his iron-town childhood and young

adult years, there had never been familial bonds with any white

people, especial y not the old Cot ingham master and his

acknowledged of spring.

Green's uncle, Abraham Cot ingham, the once spirited

Republican, having journeyed farther from the country crossroads

where the freed slaves congregated after emancipation from old

man Cot ingham's farm than any others, made his home in Shelby

County. Abraham's sons, Jimmy—known as "Cap"—and Frank, were

nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

bit ersweet paradox of black life at the dawn of the twentieth

century. They had never been slaves. They had voted in elections.

Now they had seen al vestiges of legal citizenship stripped away.

Cap, Frank, and Abraham cast bal ots for the last time in 1901, the

nal election in which blacks were permit ed meaningful

participation in Alabama. Green would never experience that act.

Cap Cot ingham's ouster from the voting rol s was punctuated a

few months later by his arrest, during a visit back in Bibb County,

on a misdemeanor charge. He was quickly sold into the bondage of

a white farmer named O. T. Grimes. On February 18, 1902, Cap

and another prisoner named Henry Johnson successful y ed the

farm and escaped.2

In the fal of 1903, as Warren Reese prepared for the last

peonage trial in Montgomery, Cap was arrested again, this time by

a Shelby County deputy. The charge was for violating the Alabama

statute forbidding any person from carrying a concealed weapon.

The records of Cap's arrest signal that he was picked up as part of a

general roundup in Columbiana to l an order for black labor

from Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. Cap, a muscular six-foot-

tal thirty- ve-year-old with skin as deeply black as his great-

grandfather Scipio's, was arrested along with another African

American named Monroe Wal ace. Both were charged with carrying

concealed weapons on October 2, 1903, and sentenced to four

months and twenty days of hard labor to pay their nes and fees to

the sheri and court. By the end of the month, the two were joined

in the jail by seven other blacks arrested for climbing aboard an

empty freight car, another for gambling, and one more for an

al eged pet y theft.

Six weeks later, on November 21, the county's convict labor

agent, W J. Farley, emptied the jail and delivered its contents to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Cap Cot ingham was turned over

for $9 a month.3 He survived his winter in the Prat Mines and

returned to Columbiana the fol owing year. The creep of darkness

paused, but it would not last.

As the new century bloomed, the civic con dence of the editor of

the gray-typed Shelby County Sentinel was so great that he ordered

a photographer to document the landmarks of the burgeoning town

and penned a twenty-page paean to its economic prospects and fine

citizenry. It was natural, and more than a lit le self-interested, for

editor J. A. MacKnight to do so, given that on the side he was also

the town's leading real estate man.

"The town is beautiful y situated, on a plateau which is

splendidly drained," MacKnight gushed. "There is so lit le sickness

that the doctors are nearly al poor men and their number is few."4

Hyperbole yes, but there was good reason to be enthused. The